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Boeing’s Social-Media Lesson

By Stephanie Clifford May 3, 2010 5:44 pmMay 3, 2010 5:44 pm

Harry WinsorEight-year-old Harry Winsor submitted this fan mail to Boeing, and received a form letter in return.

Harry Winsor, an 8-year-old from Boulder, Colo., loves airplanes. He flies with his father, John Winsor, the chief executive of the ad agency Victors & Spoils, to places like Europe and Africa regularly. Recently, he began designing his own airplanes, and decided to send one such drawing to Boeing with the suggestion that they manufacture his plane.

“He decided on his own, in that kind of ‘8 years old, I own the world, I think I’ll give Boeing the privilege of building one of my designs,'” John Winsor said.

Harry drafted a few letters, and sent his final version — a crayon drawing showing a plane that apparently had firefighting abilities — this spring.

Boeing’s response suggested it felt its fans were never too young for the hard lessons of intellectual-property law.

“Like many large companies,” it wrote Harry in a form letter, “we do not accept unsolicited ideas. Experience showed that most ideas had already been considered by our engineers and that there can be unintended consequences to simply accepting these ideas. The time, cost and risk involved in processing them, therefore, were not justified by the benefits gained.”

Not too encouraging for an 8-year-old. “I didn’t know what to do with it,” Mr. Winsor said. “Should I tell him and crush his creativity, the cold hard facts of the world? Or should I let him live under the delusion?”

Commenters said that Boeing needed to deal better with customers. “Thanks to the open system we live in, the pressure is now (rightfully!) on industry to embrace people for well, people,” wrote one.

Boeing Corporate had just begun tweeting a couple of weeks earlier, and saw some Twitter messages about it, said Todd Blecher, a spokesman who oversees Boeing’s Twitter account. He tried to figure out what had happened. “We don’t have a more children-appropriate response for things like that,” Mr. Blecher said. “If someone opens your note and feels that for whatever reason they want to do something more than send back the form letter, then they can. But we get a lot of these, and anything from an adult — especially if it looks like an official proposal — has to get a form letter to protect us. Then, it’s frankly a matter of whether someone has the time to go the extra mile, even for a child.”

Though Boeing had traditionally been buttoned up and corporate, Mr. Blecher began using Twitterto respond to supporters of Harry. “We’re expert at airplanes but novices in social media. We’re learning as we go,” he wrote in one message.

There was an enthusiastic response from Harry’s supporters. “I think they are hearing that people have a fond love for Boeing and they need to interact with people a bit more to continue to build that love!” one wrote.

“What intrigued me,” Mr. Winsor said, was “all of a sudden there was all this positive feedback — ‘Boeing responded, this is so cool’ — and the more they got encouraged, the more they engaged in it.” The Future of Flight museum contacted Harry about a kids’ drawing contest, and the Museum of Flight called to offer a tour. Mr. Blecher ended up calling Harry and e-mailing with Mr. Winsor, and the company is working on a response to Harry’s initial letter and a better way of handling submissions from children.

“It was just so cool to see a company become kind of human,” Mr. Winsor said.